“I’m rubber and your glue, whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you!” How many times when we were kids did we use this line or how many times have we heard children today use it? There is no counting the times this phrase has been uttered and repeated. The concept it conveys is so easy to understand that even three and four year olds can realize its meaning. The idea that no matter what one could say, their own speech would be turned around and applied back on themselves.
We can make a spiritual application to this saying; whatever we tell others when it comes to what God wants us to do also applies to ourselves. In Matthew 23:15 Jesus is rebuking the scribes and the Pharisees, and he pronounces this woe on them, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.” These Jewish leaders had placed a double standard on those they taught. They punished sin harshly when it was not their own and disregarded their own short comings.
The book of James admonishes us all to, “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed” (James 1:22-25). This text does not tell us to show everyone else their reflection in the perfect law of liberty. It tells us to examine ourselves in it. We should realize even though what we may be saying is true to a brother, sister, or unbeliever that it does not negate our own responsibility for us to keep that same rule or law.
In 2 Corinthians 13:5 Paul writes that we should “examine ourselves” or test ourselves to see whether we are in the faith our not. We read in Matthew 7:3-6 that we should, “first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” If we first examine ourselves and correct ourselves, then we can clearly help out others. The word of God is like “glue” in that it sticks, applies to all of us. We should all carefully examine ourselves before we try to admonish one an other.
Jeremy Ferguson